⇥ A new candidate for the Darwin Awards: me.

As far as backups go, until yesterday I liked to think that I had a pretty reasonable setup. As I’ve mentioned more than once before, I have a Mac and, having installed Leopard the day before it came out, I have been using Time Machine ever since.

Given that Apple didn’t “officially” support remote backups when I installed Leopard, and given the fact that my network is entirely wireless (thus making a 100GB backup painfully slow), I simply connected a generously-sized hard drive to my iMac and let Time Machine do its thing.

This approach seemed to work well—it’s saved me a couple of times from losing important data (like, for example, the one time when a mistake in my .Mac configuration caused my entire Keychain to vaporize)—and so it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally discovered the fatal flaw in my plan: you see, the hard drive is physically connected to the computer.

It is necessary for me at this point to step back to a little over a week ago, when my office was being cleaned. I’m not sure exactly how, but it appears that a powerbar managed to lodge itself underneath the side of one of my desk’s legs, thus making it slightly unstable, but not enough so for me to notice. In retrospect, the desk felt a little wobbly (it’s usually very solid), but I guess not wobbly enough for me to worry.

And so, yesterday afternoon, as I stood up from the desk, I bumped against it enough to tip it over front-to-back. As the ninety-degree rotation was taking place—slow enough for me to take notice of every single object tipping over and getting ready to crack itself open on the floor with delightful horror, but not slow enough for me to stop it from happening—I managed to get a hold of the one item on my desk that I couldn’t have cared less about: my $50 cell phone.

Meanwhile, the $3,000 iMac and my ever-so-precious backup hard drive happily slid off the desk and landed next to each other on the wooden floor. I wouldn’t be able to tell you just how they landed on the floor—I was too busy grabbing my freaking cell phone and holding on to it for dear life.

I am, however, able to tell you that both the Mac and the hard drive landed in such a way that the hard disks were physically damaged beyond repair. Even as I realized that my precious cell phone was mercifully safe, and I’d be able to get gouged by my cell provider without interruption, I could hear the dreaded clicking sounds that clearly marked all my data as gone in a puddle of magnetic dust.

The best part of this is that two crystal glasses were right next to the computer and fell to the floor from the same height without so much as a scratch. I had previously managed to break a glass from the same batch with my bare hands (this is why I no longer make or take phone calls with a glass in my hands). If there is a God, he was having a good chuckle yesterday.

And now you know, if I don’t get back to you for a few days—it’s not personal… I am busy collecting my Darwin Award.


PS: Interestingly, the computer was otherwise fine—which made it possible for me to run over to the local computer store, buy a new hard disk, replace it and be off reinstalling everything. While I was at it, I also bought a Time Capsule—I know, it’s not necessary, but what the hell.